DEER SLOBBER
DRAPER’S PAPER ROUTE
DEER SLOBBER
by Adam Carroll Draper
ALERT to Bambi lovers: it’s deer season. Some of my dearest friends live for this. They would set me straight right away, since we have been in bow hunting season for a while now. But now we’re switchin’ to guns. It’s on! The thirty ought sixes have been sighted. The deer stands are ready. The camo coverings are donned, complete with fully implemented scent control strategies.
“Be very quiet. I’m hunting [deer].”
Just so I don’t come across as a poser, it is incumbent upon me to say right here and now that I don’t hunt. Killing a deer would mess with me. It’s how they stare at you. Don’t get me wrong, we need hunters. Their devoted rituals amuse me, but I am glad my friends hunt. I may not like killing deer, but I do like eating them. I feel the same way about killing and eating cows. If I had to slaughter a cow I raised, hell… I might starve. But thank God Costco has steaks. Costco doesn’t have deer meat, but my friend, Pete, does. He makes a great deer Stroganov.
Publishing this might incite the PETA folks to throw fake blood on me, but come to think of it, deer is pretty good on pita, too. I agree with my friend, Darwin, who poses the query: if we’re not supposed to eat animals, why are they made of meat?
Deer season reminds me of deer slobber. What? You’ve never heard of deer slobber?
Previously, I introduced you to my friend, Clark, who I ran around with when I lived out in the middle of nowhere in Georgia as a kid. Clark was full of witty malapropisms. If he did not like the direction things were heading, for instance, he would say, “We gonna be shit up a creek without a paddle.” At other times, he would recall a snappy retort that he could not quite seem to get to come out right. For instance, if someone told him to shut up, he would say emphatically: “Shut don’t go up. Prices does go up. Take my advice and shut up yer damn self!” For those of you who don’t recall the retort he was attempting, it goes: Shut don’t go up; prices do. Take my advice and shut up, too. To me, Clark’s version is better, but I’m the only one that laughs when I say it. (Yeah, I laugh at my own jokes. Shut up!).
One fine, funny day, Clark and I were walking down a path in the woods behind my house when he yelled, “Lookie yonder, deer slobber!”
He had seen a spittlebug (some people call them froghoppers). It’s a little bug that surrounds itself with something that looks like spit, you know - a frothy loogy. I told him that it was not deer slobber.
“It ain’t done it, dumbass,” said Clark. “We was walkin’ out yonder by that beaver dam one day and seent ‘is deer with slobber coming out his mouth. When we runned over ‘ere, we seent ‘is same thang. That’s deer slobber, City Boy.”
We walked over to the “deer slobber,” and I showed him the bug.
“How ‘bout that shit,” said Clark. “A deer done slobbered on a bug.”
Clark poked around at the spittlebug for a while until I was able to cajole his skeptical butt to walk on. We hadn’t gone twenty yards down the path when his brother, who he called “That Wide,” found us. You can’t make this up. Swear to God it happened. That Wide saw another spittlebug, and yelled, “Clark, lookie yonder, deer sloober!”
Of course, Clark set his little brother straight. “It ain’t done it, dumbass. It’s a bug in ‘ere!”
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